Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A loop of leather, cloth, or synthetic material that is sewn at the side or the top rear of a boot to help in pulling the boot on.
- n. An instance of starting of a computer; a boot.
- v. To promote and develop by use of one's own initiative and work without reliance on outside help: "We've bootstrapped our way back with aggressive tourism and recruiting high tech industries” ( John Corrigan).
- v. Computer Science To boot (a computer).
- adj. Undertaken or accomplished with minimal outside help.
- adj. Being or relating to a process that is self-initiating or self-sustaining.
- idiom. by (one's) (own) bootstraps By one's own efforts.
Wiktionary
- n. A loop (leather or other material) sewn at the side or top rear of a boot to help in pulling the boot on.
- n. A means of advancing oneself or accomplishing something without aid.
- n. computing The process by which the operating system of a computer is loaded into its memory
- n. computing The process necessary to compile the tools that will be used to compile the rest of the system or program.
- n. statistics Any method or instance of estimating properties of an estimator (such as its variance) by measuring those properties when sampling from an approximating distribution.
- v. To help (oneself) without the aid of others.
- v. computing To load the operating system into the memory of a computer. Usually shortened to boot.
- v. computing To compile the tools that will be used to compile the rest of the system or program.
WordNet 3.0
- v. help oneself, often through improvised means
- n. a strap that is looped and sewn to the top of a boot for pulling it on
Etymologies
- boot + strap (Wiktionary)
Examples
“In the late sixties, Jerry and a pair of protégés, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, began pursuing what they called bootstrap investments—what later became famously known as leveraged buyouts.”
“Because of that connectedness, the only URI you need to give to your clients is one URI called the bootstrap URI..”
“My dad was a PDP-11 programmer in the old days, and he's got great stories about booting the machine up with a "bootstrap" -- a strip of punched cardboard that you whipped through the computer like the strip on a Hot Wheels car, so that it could find all the gunk it needed to start up properly.”
“The good news is that many could be "bootstrap" - financing technologies.”
“I’ve gotten some emails from people who seem like they might know what they’re doing on the insides of WordPress, so I’ll play along and start the bootstrap from the OPML Editor side of things (hoping some OPML Editor users or developers pitch in when they see questions they can answer).”
“A bootstrap is a process which, in order to create an X, you need one or more X's.”
“Old people, for the most part, no longer fit into the "bootstrap" narrative that says the best kind of person is the one who is most in control and least reliant on other people.”
The Huffington Post: Lynn Casteel Harper: Aging with Courage: The Beginning of a Living Faith
“In effect, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued this morning, to "bootstrap" the evidence and the arguments into the case.”
“Someone actually wrote 'bootstrap' and 'Marxist' just above.”
On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with...
“Firmware is write-once, read-many memory, and generally is just there to 'bootstrap' the computer -- do the initial hardware configuration, and look around for an operating system on a hard disk to load.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘bootstrap’.
-
It's a trap
trap, gin, snare, deadfall, trapezium, trapezoid, trappist, venus flytrap, foothold trap, trapping pit, glue trap, trap set and 98 more...
-
WF - nominal compounds (figurative)
An extensive list I have been working on for quite some time. Feel free to add more of the kind if you miss any.
brainstorming, upside, downside, goldplating, bikeshedding, mudslinging, downgrading, headhunter, streamlining, mainstreaming, gerrymandering, frontloading and 503 more...
-
Your Mission: Find theTraps
List of words that contain the letter string *trap*. Some are obvious and apparent, such as trapezoid, while others are a bit less apparent, such as contrapuntist, ultraphysical, and intraperitoneal.
trapezoid, contrapuntist, wentletrap, allotetraploid, bootstrap, caltrap, unstrap, Trappist, ultraphysical, trapline, Trapt, autotetraploidy and 195 more...
-
Siamese-Twin Words
Idea from Will Shortz's NPR puzzle feature. Two words that share a common letter (end of first word and start of second word) and forming a larger word, e.g., mill and lion = mil-l-ion. Variants ...
cordial, portable, trillion, retort, preposition, palace, domesticity, passage, shallow, electorate, bootstrap, turkey and 9 more...
-
Computers changed everything
Words that were well established before they gained special use in computing systems.
server, protocol, interface, bug, spam, virus, mouse, program, hack, chip, drive, window and 61 more...
-
haguremetaru's Words
floozy, mandalay, mandible, x, don't, will, ridiculous, funily, stuff, junk, doody, manning and 152 more...
-
sionnach's Words
contumely, fomite, holmgang, poltroon, eleemosynary, obsidian, nugatory, grindcore, felch, recrudescent, pyx, parenteral and 3271 more...
-
dienekes's Words
chutzpah, lexicon, intrepid, pedagogical, schlemiel, schism, erudite, anathema, pugilist, jaunty, paradigm, automaton and 949 more...
-
likaluca's Words
recursive, genuflect, libidinous, emote, smote, importune, trill, chillax, overshare, shorn, needle, ego and 162 more...
-
objects
teapot, tea cosy, kettle, bandana, canopy, crockery, cutlery, doormat, easel, loupe, allen key, bric-a-brac and 35 more...
-
statistical terms
ogive, kurtosis, median polish, central limit the..., martingale, submartingale, characteristic fu..., spline, split-plot design, autocorrelation, heteroscedasticity, hypergeometric and 76 more...
-
New Words
New Words - Building my own vocabulary
brownfield, greenfield, behalf, pet peeve, lead time, mock, proxy, craftsman, cliff, Nimble, Awkward, craftsmanship and 85 more...
-
cosmican's Words
multifarious, offbeat, resurgence, stupendous, apotheosis, abuzz, altruism, ostensible, exemplar, dawns, tranquility, candid and 28 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for bootstrap.
Comments
No comments yet...
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.